


Wayfarers All

by Chaifootsteps



Category: No Man's Sky (Video Game)
Genre: Alien Flora & Fauna, Exploration, Gen, Science Fiction, Seahorse Anatomy, Wanderlust, space travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-17
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-09 08:10:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7794022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chaifootsteps/pseuds/Chaifootsteps
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An unassuming naturalist from a vast blue world, Clarel gave in to the call of the universe and never looked back. </p><p>Except for when he does.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Clarel tries very hard not to think about what’s behind him. 

He knows it’s the fastest route to regretting every step.

Food is a major factor, unsurprisingly. Once an ardent defender of traditional coastal cuisine (and a secretive lover of cheap, salty Lutris street food), his diet nowadays consists of a metallic nutrient gel and hard, dry biscuits in foil packets that smell and taste vaguely of shrimp paste. If he dwells on it too long, he knows full well he’ll find himself hunched over a phantom bowl of fat prawn soup, or roasted fish bellies braised in palm nectar, or an electric purple crab pulled up live and writhing from the shallows, his claws thrust into the narrow hole behind the apron and the shell cracked between his teeth. 

The road home is a long one, paved with snow-white meat and sweet, succulent roe and memories of his father waking them early to go crabbing.

His sleeping situation is another one, given that the ship barely houses a single bunk. He often wakes with his tail crimped sharply between his back and the ceiling, and as a consequence, never feels as though he’s had quite enough rest. As he rises pre-daylight to pages of notes and anatomical charts, it dawns on him that he hasn’t popped so many stimulant tabs since he was twenty-five and gunning for his doctorate.

The air dries his skin and bakes his wide, round eyes. He thought the indignity of doing fieldwork in what amounts to a large diaper would pass, but it never did. He could _certainl_ y do without the bi-daily act of flushing his gills with saline solution, hoping it will safeguard him against the myriad of respiratory diseases known to plague other aquatic races during long-term space travel. 

Then of course, there remains the constant, creeping presence of the Atlas. In the few times it has put in an appearance, it has always made him feel impossibly cozy and loved; accepted and valued. 

In the deep sea, things that induce those sorts of feelings get you killed.

And he could take all of it – _every miserable moment of it_ – if only he could cancel out the fact that he won’t be there as his parents’ time grows smaller.

But it’s not all bad, this life he’s chosen…not _all_ dreams paling hard and fast beside reality, and that initial swell of finally giving in to the unknown’s call. The sunlight never paints the same picture twice when it’s pouring over the curve of an uncharted planet. He’s learning the dazzling array of colors an atmosphere can take, and recalls cursing in astonishment at the unexpected snowflake structure of a plutonium feeding bird’s bones placed beneath an electron microscope. He’ll never be over the time a Gek trader poured him some fresh water that did not taste like his suit, taught him the Gek word for ‘destroy’, and asked him what his race called themselves.

( _’Zzraaay? Zraaay…ek!’._ It had been close enough.) 

Just the other day, he sat beneath a plant that looked like a gemstone and watched his newest discovery – cattle-sized xenarthids – suction nutrients from the golden stone.  _Rifiliss asnacablo,_ he called them.Softbacks. Named for their personalities as much as the fleshy squares of padding over their spines. Abandoning some of that inherent timidness, three of the young ones had toddled on over, blinking up at him with something akin to wonder. Before he knew it, he had one in his lap and another situated on his head.

“Well! Just look at you!” he’d laughed, voice hollow within his suit. “Does this mean you’ve forgiven me for startling your parents?” 

The smallest had responded by trying to eat his pen.

No, he thinks. 

It’s not a bad life at all.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Animal death, poisoning, euthanasia

_‘ Logdate: 47634.44_ ****  
_Auranonojo-Lafsso Srindge_  
 _Uobreidspu star system'_

 _First encounter with T. zetarius was a violent one. Was returning across the plain at around 076:04. Struck from behind and sent me end over end down the hill. Came at me a second time and caught me once in the right shoulder. No permanent damage to exosuit; no envenomation. Bacterial cultures swabbed; processing. Have contacted outpost to request treatment measures.’_  

                                                ***

Really, that it had taken so long to finally occur was nothing short of a miracle. Just an absolute, utter miracle. And the days when Clarel might not have realized this were three decades behind him.

Up until then, interacting with the native fauna had been a pleasure cruise. The creatures he’d studied had been harmless autovores, content to feed on plants, minerals, or the light of the sun. Small foragers as curious as they were skittish, quick to lock him in with their wet eyes as they plucked up the courage to sniff his life support tubing; big, slow, easygoing beasts that regarded him as though he were no more interesting than a hank of old roots pulled up, and carried on their plodding way; birds that settled on the roof of his ship and refused to budge for any reason. But  _Tikenkh zetarius_ was an opportunistic hunter that would feed on anything that bled. 

He just hadn’t known it at the time.

His first glimpse of it came as he was scrambling to his feet, visor partially smeared with mud, left hand pinned for all his life was worth to the jagged air leak in his right arm. It was a modest sized creature with a tail as fat as its neck, almost docked in appearance, and an emerald crest that framed its broad, rough head. The front legs were twice as thick and powerful as the slender hind ones; ruby-red patches of skin running up all four limbs made it look as though its muscles had been cut and flayed bare. But the defining feature -- the one he would eventually name it for -- was that enormous green-yellow pustule on its back, throbbing away hypnotically in time with its heartbeats.

It looked like it should reek of infection, but surprisingly, what penetrated the exosuit smelled of toasted grain.

Before he could think of reaching for his gun, it was on him again, sinking its irregular, protruding incisors into his upper right arm. In the racing moment before it let go, he wondered if this was it; far from diving eels and mega sharks, the inevitable reminder from the universe itself that he’d always been born to be prey. But it _did_ let go, hacking and clawing at its tongue and the loose dangling skin of its throat. Clarel, for his part, simply ran. 

The warmth pooling beneath the sleeve of his exosuit had somehow become the least of his worries. Slipping on the soaked vegetation, choking on the depressurized atmosphere and tasting the corrosion on the air, he did not slow until he was up the lift, across the platform, and gasping up at the ceiling of his ship. As if on cue, he felt his own mortality creep in quietly and rest its head on his knee. 

The exosuit’s removal left him heaving a sigh of relief (and free to note with some dark amusement that fear had changed his normal blue coloration to an off-white that perfectly matched the Wayfarer’s walls). It was an unmistakable bite wound alright, deep, but not half as deep as all that bleeding had suggested. One of those blessedly rare things in life that looked worse than it was.

Only once he was certain they would not find his bled out coprse days later did he begin to become terribly afraid for the creature.

As unpleasant as the situation may have been for him, sr’aeph bodies were highly neurotoxic. In their corner sat an insidious, ugly little alkoloid with a grudge against the broader concept of a nervous system, heavily concentrated in the viscera, the eyes and liver and reproductive organs, and the subdermal layers of their flesh. A result of the toxic crustaceans they fed on, and had fed on for longer than they’d had a written language. It was the only thing that had kept them alive long enough to evolve a pair of legs.

It seeped from the pores in moments of anxiety. Magnified by 5000, it looked like a dragonfly.

And now it was coursing through the system of an exotic, undiscovered predator.

With the last dregs of the adrenaline rush, a decision was made. Clarel cleaned and bandaged the bite as best he could, opting to wait on word from the gek outpost before he glued it shut. And then, against the fine prickle of medical reason, he headed out after the creature. 

The acidic rains had not let up, and would not, but the three-toed tracks were clear as day in the wet, neon green moss. He tracked it for no less than a mile before he found it lying in the carbon rich underbrush, stretched on its side and heaving for breath. The giant pustule vibrated with tachycardia.

Classic presentation. He wouldn’t have felt as guilty if he’d simply shot it.

The death of a newly discovered creature was a tragedy; a wasted one even more so. Disregarding the fire in his arm, Clarel got out his toolkit and his waterproof tablet and, quickly as he could, set to taking samples. Blood samples, skin samples, and samples of the green-yellow material it had violently expunged, diluted by the rainwater. Held up against the half-day light, the latter contained visible shards of what looked to be hair and bone, possibly from one of the many prongbacks he’d been out following in the first place. Through it all, the creature lay inert. It did not appear to notice he was there.

If he'd first encountered it from a distance, would he have had the opportunity to appreciate it properly? The way its snaggle teeth interlocked for tearing off perfect slices, or the unique oblong shape of its pupils?  

He ran a line of antitoxin, drawing from the small supply he kept as a precautionary measure. For a while, there was a return to normal breathing rate and a clearness in the eyes, making Clarel suspect they would both walk away from this limping and ever so slightly wiser. But when the pustule flared a painful white-green, his heart dropped out in a way he'd been anticipating. And when the back arched into an unbreakable, agonizing bow, he knew that the point of no return had been passed.

He rested a hand on its flank as the plunger began its descent.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry...you couldn’t have known. I would have tried to eat me too.”

If there was more to say, he would not be the one to say it. He withdrew his touch, and the last annoyance of his voice, and let it spend its final moments in a reality where he'd never trespassed on its planet.

Let the distant lowing of prey, the rumble of a perpetual storm, and the sound of rainwater flowing through the long grasses they belonged to take it on home.


End file.
